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Chicago Boyz*

Friedman Hayek Stigler Becker Sowell Buchanan Knight Fermi Epstein Strauss Simon Howard McNeill Coase Shils Shultz mashed or boiled?
*Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago boys including those pictured above, and others who helped to liberalize Latin American economies.

March 19, 2004

Predictive Fumble

In last week's Economist, on the Madrid bombing :
Coming just three days before a general election which the ruling conservatives now seem even more likely to win...

[...]

The Socialists will not make such claims now. But their chances of taking office next week, in Madrid, look even slimmer.
Oh well. For all the differences between this country and that one, there is a lesson and warning here for Republicans about assuming too much. Not that they seem to care, of course.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 12:34 PM | Comments (3)

If we could only get back into good graces with the French...

That great beacon of freedom continues to shine.

Posted by Andy Bizub at 10:46 AM | Comments (8)

Free Trade



Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 06:19 AM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2004

Size Matters

Harley Davidson might have to rename the Fat Boy. The Roadog makes it look like a puny Italian moped. Even a Hummer cannot compete with its manly 110 feet turning radius.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 01:12 PM | Comments (4)

A Moment Of Truth

After expounding on the unnecessary evil the State can so casually inflict on individuals, we will now give it some credit for this burst of raw honesty :
By a wide margin, the Senate on Thursday approved a measure that would prevent most civilian federal agencies from outsourcing jobs to contractors working outside the United States.

The measure, introduced by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., as an amendment to a corporate tax bill, also would prohibit agencies from procuring goods or services from companies that send work abroad, with some exceptions. Senators endorsed the bipartisan amendment by a vote of 70 to 26.
In other words, the government wants to forbid itself to provide the best possible value-for-money to its taxpayers. When you cannot, or do not want to fix an endemic problem, you might as well make it illegal to try.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 10:28 AM | Comments (7)

Mad Cow Disease Outbreak In London

Most libertarians will tell you that the State has long ago eclipsed the capitalist robber barons when it comes to sheer greed, rapaciousness, paranoia, reach, corruption and ambition. Having grown up in a country where the government swallows about 54% of GDP on any given year, you can imagine how I came to regard places like New Hampshire as the Promised Land. ("No VAT ? No income tax ? How do you mean ? Is that legal ? I don't pay a tax and I stay out of jail ? Radical !")

An experience which also led me to believe France was undoubtedly in the top league of statist decadence. No longer. Our neighbors and favorite historical rivals across the Channel have suddenly sped far ahead of us in the Hall Of Shame, in a move as stunning as it is insane, by any standard (emphasis mine).
WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?

An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.

On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.

Blunkett’s fight has been described as “outrageous”, “morally repugnant” and the “sickest of sick jokes”, but his spokesmen in the Home Office say it’s a completely “reasonable course of action” as the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food and lodgings if they weren’t in prison. The government deems the claw-back ‘Saved Living Expenses’.
I will admit I don't even know where to begin with this one. The absurdity of seeing Labour Party officials, people who believe they have a monopoly on caring for the poor, who never miss an occasion to pompously lecture their sheepish audience about the moral evils of money as a "social yardstick", inflicting such reckless insult and injury on individuals who have been hideously wronged and abused, and are most likely to come from the poorer parts of society, all in the name of plain, cold, morally void bean counting. And, presumably, those who cannot or do not pay would be sent back to jail for a while. And leave yet again with a new bill for the additional "savings" the government graciously "loaned" them. Including, of course, the old bill with interests.

Bottom line : if capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, then socialism clearly is its opposite.

(Link via Perry De Havilland)

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 10:01 AM | Comments (4)

March 15, 2004

Al Qaeda 200, Spain 0

For all intent and purposes, the Spanish electorate has successfully been terrorized into voting Jose Maria Aznar's People's Party out of office. Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced last Thursday that should he be elected, he would withdraw his country's 1,300 troops from Iraq if the country was not under U.N. control by June 30, telling his interviewer that
"the negative situation in the country will not improve unless the United Nations take control with the support of neighbouring Arab countries, and unless a committment is made to develop the sovereignty of the Iraqi people."
The people have spoken. And their answer is fear and denial. Next.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 08:23 AM | Comments (71)

March 13, 2004



Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 06:10 PM | Comments (9)

The Sahara's New Foreign Legion

I often wondered when America and its allies were going to deal with extremist Algerian radicals, from the active armed factions and splinter groups of the infamous GIA (Groupe Islamique Arme) to others in the region with connections to al-Qaeda's empire. The Boston Globe tells us:
US special forces are hunting for Islamic militants linked to Al Qaeda along Algeria's southern border with Mali in a little-known military operation aimed at destroying a key North African recruiting hub for Osama bin Laden's global terrorist network, according to US and Algerian officials.

Small teams of elite US soldiers have been working with local security forces in recent months in the Sahara Desert in an effort to capture or kill members of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, a radical Islamic organization that has pledged its allegiance to Al Qaeda and is suspected in terrorist plots in Europe and the United States, said the officials, who asked not to be identified.
In an election year with an incumbent running as a war president, and with Iraq remaining a hot military potato, expect more of this to dribble out. And whatever the motive for its release, this is both positive and fascinating news.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 11:21 AM | Comments (18)

March 12, 2004

On The General Theory Of Moral Relativity

Following the tragic terrorist attack in Madrid, French newspaper Le Monde runs a passionate editorial about this "European tragedy".
Nothing, obviously, no cause, no context, no so-called political objective can justify any form of terrorism.
Have the well-thinking, self-appointed guardians of political correctness at France's newspaper of record finally seen the blinding light, smelled the gun powder and read the smoking remains of the writing on the blasted wall ? Unfortunately, we doubt it. Reams of past editorials about the Palestinian "humiliation" and 9/11 in this paper and others across Europe indicate that careful attempts at "understanding" are de rigueur when mass murders target Jews or Americans, however loony or medieval their supposedly "political" motives.

To add insult to our injurious cynicism, we suspect this editorial and others like it to be part of the usual ritual of fake media sensitivity and phony national solidarity. Should al-Qaeda turn out to be the culprit, the same editors can be counted on to lay down blame and Spanish blood at the feet of the only truly evil people of the world : George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, aided and abetted by the soulless minions and other "poodles" who not only dare agree with them but even help in their diabolical enterprise of world domination. The editorial concludes :
If she did not yet know it, she does now : Europe is part of the hyper-terrorism battlefield.
We are relieved it took only 198 dead bodies for Le Monde to understand and state the obvious. And, although implicit, this is as frank an admission as you are going to see by this paper that it believed terrorism to be America's problem. How many more attacks, how many more innocent victims it would take for some of its editors to admit terrorism is not America's fault, nor Israel's, we do not know. We can only pray we never learn the answer to that question the hard way.

Update: Andrew Sullivan also blogs Le Monde's editorial and its unusually simpliste reaction.
Now they tell us. Whatever happened to all those sophisticated European "gray areas"? With any luck, they died in the wreckage of Madrid's trains.
Not to beat my dead soured horse in public one more time, but until further notice, luck remains the operative word.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 02:08 PM | Comments (12)

The Other Inflationary Universe

Few industries are as competitive, speculative, lively and prone to change as data storage. Well described in Clayton M. Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, its cycles are fast and furious, yesterday's leaders are barely a memory and tomorrow's are quite literally anyone's guess. And every time you think you have a handle on the sector's current dynamics, a new legal, political, economic or technological ingredient shifts the momentum, with sometimes dramatic consequences for the marketplace. The Economist reports on the latest twist in the saga.
Listen, for instance, to David Goulden, a senior executive at EMC, the industry leader. Under normal circumstances—ie, without Sarbanes-Oxley and its growing number of equivalents abroad—the data-storage needs of a typical company would increase by 30% or so a year. That may seem a lot, but not if you consider that the price of storage is falling by far more than 30% a year. Enter the politicians, bearing new regulations. Their net effect, says Mr Goulden, is to double the number of copies that are kept of every document, and to double the length of time for which they are kept. Suddenly, an average firm's storage needs will more than double annually.
A wonderful, quasi-direct subsidy for EMC and its competitors. The costs and consequences for their customers and other industry players are far-reaching. Additional capital for administrative storage is not invested elsewhere. Other hardware and software will not be upgraded as soon as planned, improving returns on the rest of IT budget through outsourcing becomes even more attractive, data compression algorithms and document management hardware and software are more valuable, network bandwidth must keep up, more data needs to be secured for longer, ensuring compliance feeds a new industry of consultants...

As to how much this all costs, and for what benefits to the overall economy, and how it effectively deals wit the issues lawmakers claimed to be addressing, it has obviously all been left as a practical exercise for the rest of us. Never a dull moment.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 10:30 AM | Comments (7)

March 11, 2004

Our future Euro-Prez?

I'm sure you've all heard this quote from Kerry, but Tony Blankley has a good piece on it here.

Posted by Andy Bizub at 12:51 PM | Comments (3)

March 10, 2004

Proof That We Are Living In The Future

What do you get when you mix these three things?


The Heckler & Koch G36 Assault Rifle
(currently fielded by the German and Spanish armies)


The M41-A Pulse Rifle
(used by Colonial Marines in the movie Aliens)


The Lazer Tag StarLyte Pro Toy
(used by me in my 80's childhood)


The answer is the Army's new XM-8 Carbine / Assualt Rifle.
StrategyPage says the new rifle is getting good reviews. It currently fires NATO standard 5.56mm rounds, but may be rechambered for the new 6.8mm ammo the Army is considering.

Now the M-16 / M-4 family looks cool and all, but the XM-8 looks like the guns we were promised for "The Future", along with all the flying cars, despotic coporate police states, and zero-G brothels. The rest of civilization may be failing us, but at least the military is keeping up its end of things. If only they could get those orbital weapons platforms working, we'd be all set...

Posted by Captain Mojo at 04:20 PM | Comments (32)

March 09, 2004

The Curse Of Apple

An acquaintance of mine who is ignorant about computers wanted to buy one and asked for a recommendation. Like an idiot I suggested Apple -- it's supposed to be easy to use, right? Well, he bought one, and the experience has underscored for me the wisdom of not making recommendations based on second-hand information.

There's nothing wrong with the computer, it works fine. It's just that it doesn't seem to have any ease-of-use advantage over recent Windows machines. And since I'm not an Apple person, my every attempt to help my friend use his computer is accompanied by a lot of time spent researching how to do things that are second nature for me in Windows. And because few people in my circle use Apples, it can be difficult to find someone who can answer a simple question.

So, for example, my friend receives important emails with Microsoft Office file attachments. He clicks on them and the computer informs him that his trial version of Office for Mac has expired, and would he like to buy a full version for $400? That seems like a high price to read a spreadsheet now and again. It took me a long phone call to Apple, and a long trip to my friend's place to fiddle with the computer, to determine that he can view these files using the AppleWorks software he already has. (And of course I wasn't successful in setting the file associations to make AppleWorks the default software for opening Excel files, so my friend has to do the {ctrl + click + menu} thing every time he wants to open an MS-formatted attachment. And I still don't know how to resize the spreadsheet to make it legible on the screen.) What a nuisance for both of us.

And I have no choice but to continue to help, if only because I got him into this situation. It's as if I saved his life and am now responsible for him, except that I am trying to save him mainly from the effects of my own poor judgment.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 05:21 PM | Comments (9)

How Libertarian Are You?

Via AtlanticBlog comes this link to an online test of libertarian purity. It's not bad as such tests go, though some of the questions are ambiguous (e.g., "Should the Fed be abolished and the monetary base frozen?" -- yes and no). I scored about 100, which seems high considering my positions on foreign-affairs and national-defense issues (to the right of Attila the Hun). I speculate that most of the non-blogging-type people I know would score between 10 and 40.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 05:02 PM | Comments (13)

March 07, 2004

What a shame

I have been considering moving to Virginia for various reasons, one of which is to get out of California. But it seems Virginia's state of affairs ain't much better than California's...

Good summary article by Paul Jacob.

Posted by In-Cog-Nito at 02:00 PM | Comments (5)

March 06, 2004

Chicago Destroyed By Comet

In 1871, that is.

Posted by Jay Manifold at 08:53 PM | Comments (3)

This is what happens to people who leave rude comments on our blog.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 01:48 PM | Comments (1)

Check Out Ken's Blog

If you liked Ken's recent excellent post here on health insurance, you should also take a look at his solo blog. He has some great posts up -- such as this one, this one and this one on education.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 01:21 PM | Comments (0)

The Utopian Paradox

Utopianism and despair are closely allied. Acutely conscious of the gap between the actual and the conceivable, the utopian despairs when there is no prospect of bridging it. Intellectuality conduces to utopianism by stimulating the political imagination. The ordinary person has difficulty imagining an ordering of society radically different from the current one. The intellectual does not, and, being inclined by his calling to blame shortcomings on intellectual confusion rather than on practical impediments, thinks that merely pointing to the gap between ideals and achievement is a significant contribution to the cause of social reform.
From Public Intellectuals: A Study Of Decline, by Richard A. Posner.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 01:00 PM | Comments (3)

Just Dismal

As much as one can enjoy reading The Economist, its excellent surveys, its eclectic world news coverage, op-eds and book reviews, its economics, of all things, can make you cringe. Or laugh. Or both. Bearish for most of the 90s, and despite its poor and largely disproven predictive record, the magazine is so stubbornly wedded to its Keynesian drivel it keeps churning out pieces like last week's "phoney recovery" piece.
Tax cuts have given consumers more to spend.
And this, dear friends, is the awful problem we are dealing with. You and I have more to spend. (Dark, prophetic background music starts...)

Continue reading "Just Dismal"

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 09:33 AM | Comments (10)

March 05, 2004

Injustice

So they convicted Martha Stewart. That's a shame. The case should never have been brought. We are supposed to believe that a woman who is worth hundreds of millions risked everything to avoid fifty grand in stock losses. It's simply unbelievable, and it begs the question of what fiduciary duty she had to Imclone shareholders (none). The judge earlier threw out the serious fraud charge, so Stewart was convicted mainly of making false statements to investigators when she was not under oath.

The prosecutors got lucky here. They had a weak case, were essentially making up law, and the jury bought it. I hope that other prosecutors won't be emboldened to engage in more of these persecutions.

One of the likely problems here was the quality of the jurors. What kind of person was so ignorant that he didn't already know a lot about this highly publicized case before he was called? This is a systematic problem. It's difficult to find intelligent people who are willing to put their lives on hold during what's likely to be a long trial.

I was once called for jury duty and assigned to a notorious criminal case for which everyone expected a lengthy trial. I can tell you that once the prospective jurors learned which case they were on, almost every one of them wanted to be excused. To my relief, I was excused (after waiting two days to be interviewed) because I had a strong opinion about the case. The prospective jurors who had not been excused by the time I left did not strike me as the kinds of people I would want to have on my jury if I were a defendant.

Yes, jury service is important, but how many able people are willing to take a several-week forced vacation in exchange for fifteen dollars a day? We effectively force jurors to subsidize our legal system, and the more a juror's time is worth the more he pays to serve. Perhaps it would be better to pay jurors an amount that comes closer to compensating them for their time -- if they are intelligent people, maybe $200 a day as a start. It would be expensive, and there are many individuals for whom such an amount wouldn't be nearly enough, but it might improve the quality of jury decisions, particularly in complex and white-collar cases.

There is no way, under the current system, for someone like Martha Stewart to be tried by a jury of her peers. Would such a jury, or at least a jury of people who are somewhat sophisticated about business and financial matters, have convicted her? I doubt it. And even if they might have done so, she still deserved better than to have the facts of her case evaluated by people who probably lack significant experience in these areas.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 05:58 PM | Comments (19)

More Outsourcing

Leave it to a VC guy to make a good point succinct. Excellent article over at Ventureblog about outsourcing. The article is a little old, but good nonetheless.

"there are two ways to make a car -- you can either make it in Detroit or grow it in Iowa. You already know how to make it in Detroit. You get a bunch of iron ore, smelt it into steel, and have an assembly line of robots and workers shape it into a finished vehicle.

To grow it in Iowa, you plant car seeds in the ground (also known as "wheat"), wait until they sprout, and harvest them. Take the harvest and put it into a big boat marked "to Japan" and let it sail off. A few months later a brand new car comes back."

Posted by In-Cog-Nito at 12:30 PM | Comments (1)

March 04, 2004

I owe my health to the Company Store

We are told that, prior to the current enlightened age, one of the ways that evil corporations would rip off their workers was the Company Store. Instead of giving you money, they'd operate a Company Store and give you goods. Problem was, without real money, you couldn't go to a competing store that might give you a better deal unless you switched jobs. You'd have to put up with whatever inferior, overpriced merchandise they felt like stocking.

Kind of a bummer, right? It's a good thing that our Corporate Overlords saw the light and quit that nonsense.

Or did they?

The Company Store isn't gone, it's just been reduced in scope. Now the Company Store mainly offers health insurance and retirement investments. But, in the areas where the Company Store reigns supreme, the same problems keep cropping up.

You can't switch health plans without switching jobs. The insurance company's customers is your employer, not you. The insurance company doesn't have any reason to keep you happy (it just has to keep you from getting so unhappy you'll switch jobs in order to get rid of its policy), and it shows every time you have to deal with it.

Oddly enough, while its customer service is busy treating you like the non-customer you are, the plan itself winds up paying for things that make no sense whatsoever from an insurance standpoint. This is because a company insurance plan functions partly as a tax-dodge to spend pre-tax dollars on routine maintenance that it would never make sense to buy actual insurance for. If not for tax rules, you would never buy an insurance policy that covers routine checkups you know with absolute certainty that you're going to get; you know you're going to end up paying the full cost of the checkups plus a markup for the insurance company.

Also, since company health plans must offer the same rate to every worker, your company gets hit with the cost differential when it brings in older or less healthy workers. Giving companies a direct financial incentive to engage in age discrimination doesn't strike me as an especially good idea. Setting things up so that their costs, and their profits, are affected by unhealthy things you do in your off time is also just asking for trouble.

And, since all policies must cover the same things, you get stuck buying coverages you don't want, and can't specify coverages you do want. Lawmakers have also taken to piling on coverages that must be included in all group plans, such as birth control pills (!).

And, of course, it would be nice if periods of unemployment had no impact on your health insurance other than by way of your ability to pay the premium. Business creation would be more common if getting off of someone else's payroll didn't impact your health plan.

Now we're told that the only way that we can get employers out of the loop is to bring government into the loop. Apparently, individuals can't just buy healthcare on their own, someone (either the employer or the government) has to "give" it to them (with their own money, of course).

This is, of course, nonsense. The standard objections to individual insurance purchases are:

Continue reading "I owe my health to the Company Store"

Posted by ken at 04:58 PM | Comments (10)

Nader

Good article by Thomas Sowell on Ralph Nader.

Posted by In-Cog-Nito at 01:46 PM | Comments (1)

March 03, 2004

Random Musings and Disingenuous Intellectualism

The Journal's editorial page today has several good letters responding to Karinna Gore Schiff's diatribe on the candidacy of Ralph Nader. Unfortunately, I can't link to them, you'll have to pick up a paper copy, but it's worth the buck.
Jesse Jackson once again has made himself prosecutor, judge, and jury. In less than one week, he has apparently been able to ascertain all the facts concerning Haiti and Aristide's flight, and the Chicago Sun Times has deemed to print them.
Finally, my friend Andy continues his running summary of the state of the world (as seen through his eyes).

Posted by Andy Bizub at 09:26 AM | Comments (2)

March 02, 2004

Bring It On

Mickey Kaus about JFK2 :
As a Democrat, I have two big fears about John Kerry. The first is that he'll lose. The second is that he'll win.


Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 08:11 AM | Comments (5)

March 01, 2004

Blog Comments: Tradeoffs

Having comments is great. However, old posts tend to attract annoying spam messages, so once posts are more than about a month old, and no longer appear on the blog's main page, I usually close them to new comments.

But a problem with doing this is that once in a while somebody leaves an extraordinary comment on an old post. Some of these comments come months after the original post and are from people who have some connection to the subject of the post.

See, for example, here, and the last comment here. And check out the last comment on this old post about the Mongolian army, which was made just last night by a Mongolian army reservist who lives in the U.S. These comments got through only because in the first two cases I was not yet in the habit of closing comments on old posts, and in the case of the Mongolian post I hadn't yet gotten around to closing them for the latest batch. (I have left the Mongolian post open to comments in case anyone wants to respond to Amar.)

So does anyone know of a better way to handle comments? I hesitate to use the "copy this number" anti-spambot system that other blogs, e.g., Samizdata, use (for an example, see here and scroll down to the "Post a comment" section), because it's burdensome for users. I thought of closing comments, but also posting a conspicuous message suggesting that commenters email us if a thread is closed, but that's burdensome too. Another alternative is to leave comments open longer, but also to hack Movable Type so that the editing window displays more than the five most recent comments (Steve does something like this). In that case we would still get spam but it would be easier to find and remove.

Any other ideas?

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 08:48 AM | Comments (14)

February 29, 2004

Photoshop: easier than real painting

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 10:59 AM | Comments (9)

Daniel J. Boorstin, 1914-2004

A Chicago Boy has passed. Author of The Americans (The Colonial Experience; The National Experience; The Democratic Experience), The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers, among others; Professor in History, 1944-64, and Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor, 1964-69; and Librarian of Congress from 1975-1987. WaPo obit here; USAToday obit here. Requiescat in pace.

Posted by Jay Manifold at 07:06 AM | Comments (2)

February 28, 2004

With Allies Like These, Who Needs Enemies ?

We like to keep tabs on what Bernard-Henri Levy is up to. We talked about his book on Daniel Pearl when it came out. His warnings about Pakistan now confirmed, and even though he can't avoid saying he told us so, his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed is worth reading.
[...] since Pakistan is steered by the iron hand of its secret service and its army, it is inconceivable that Khan operated alone without orders or cover. We will understand more precisely that we cannot repeat without contradiction that, on the one hand, the Pakistani nuclear arsenal is under control, and that not a warhead can budge without the authorities' knowledge, and, on the other, that Khan was acting alone, working on his own account, with no official connivance. To put it simply and disconcertingly: Pakistan's nuclear weapons need to be secured. They cannot--will not--be secured by Pakistan alone.
Indeed. But who will ? America is too busy occupying a vast Middle-Eastern country that had no WMDs left to deal effectively with its Saudi and Pakistani "allies", while both keep churning truckloads of terrorist volunteers, many of whom now travel to Iraq for target practice.

In the meantime, an extremist scientist has, with the approval of his leadership, been perpetrating the very crime America allegedly no longer tolerates, supplying the entire Axis of Evil with the very technology the President says we will not allow them to have. And this is not old history.
Far from ending on Sept. 11, 2001--the day, we are told, on which "the world changed"--this terrifying nuclear traffic continued until well after: A last trip to Pyongyang, his thirteenth, was made in June 2002 by the good doctor Khan; not to mention the ship inspected last August in the Mediterranean, transporting elements of a future nuclear plant to Libya.
In other words, even as the President delivered his famed speech, our Pakistani "ally" was busy trafficking and selling nuclear technology - some of it military - to those he named and shamed as our enemies. Where is the outrage ? What are we doing about it ? The silence from Republicans and Democrats alike is deafening, just when we are finally confronted with the brutal reality of our worst fears.
And at last, sooner or later, we will come to the real secret: that of al Qaeda; and of Khan's links to Lashkar-e-Toiba, the fundamentalist terrorist group at the heart of al Qaeda; and the fact that this "mad scientist" is first of all mad about God, a fanatical Islamist who in his heart and soul believes that the bomb of which he is the father should belong, if not to the Umma itself, at least to its avant-garde, as incarnated by al Qaeda. So let us not shrink from measuring the probability of a nightmare scenario: to wit, a Pakistani state which--in the shelter of its alliance with an America that is decidedly not counting inconsistencies--could furnish al Qaeda with the means to take the ultimate step of its jihad.
Pakistan has given us the Taliban and nuclear proliferation. What are we going to do about it, Mr President ? If Iraq was enough of a danger to warrant a U.N. resolution and military intervention, what do you make of Pakistan ?
How much time will it take for all this to be said? How much longer will Islamabad's masquerade endure? Next month the American Congress will vote on the question of three billion dollars in aid to Pakistan: Will this aspect of things be taken into account?
Call me cynical, but I will not be holding my breath.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 04:59 PM | Comments (29)

February 27, 2004

Talk about bleeding edge

Mrs. Nito and I will be having our first baby soon. In anticipation, I'm in the market for a camcorder and a DVD recorder to record everything.

I found this little wonder via Gotapex.com: Tivo and DVD recorder mixed into one. If I'm not mistaken, this pretty much makes you the coolest kid on the block. Anyone with opinions one way or other on DVD recorders and/or PVR-DVDR combos?

Posted by In-Cog-Nito at 01:24 AM | Comments (4)

February 26, 2004

Phenomenal

Funny article about Lou Dobb's "Exporting America" companies. If you had invested in all the companies listed, you would have returned 72% for the past year.

(Thanks to Don Luskin for the link)

Posted by In-Cog-Nito at 04:35 PM | Comments (20)

Must Have

If you're in the market for a new car, you got to get a Trunk Monkey.

(Via Bob)

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 02:45 PM | Comments (2)

Diversity Police, Pull Over

From the Miami Herald :
U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown verbally attacked a top Bush administration official during a briefing on the Haiti crisis Wednesday, calling the President's policy on the beleaguered nation "racist" and his representatives "a bunch of white men."

Her outburst was directed at Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega during a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill.
After decades of affirmative action and state-sponsored "race education", a black U.S. representative feels entitled to vent her bigotry in public. It gets better. When Mr Noriega kindly pointed out that he was a Mexican-American...
Brown then told him "you all look alike to me," the participants said.
Racism is the white man's disease and affirmative action is good for society. Move right along.

(Link via InstaPundit)

Related:Don Luskin links to this City Journal article about political correctness force-feeding in prep schools.

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 10:33 AM | Comments (3)

Political Benchmarks

One problem with political campaigns is a lot like a problem with mutual-fund performance measurement: it's common practice only to compare candidates against the competition rather than versus absolute standards. So a mutual fund that loses money for customers may be called good if it loses less money than other funds do, or less than do market indices like the S&P; 500.

Similarly, journalists often seem more interested in the competitive aspects of campaigns than they do in substantial questions about candidates' characters and ideas.

I can understand this selective performance-framing when it's done by fund companies, because they want to show their products in the best light possible. I can even understand why some financial journalists follow the same line to avoid discussing funds' absolute rates of return or alternative investments. The publications these journos work for usually accept fund advertising, after all.

But why do political journalists who are unaffiliated with the campaigns they cover do it? Why do they so often ask Candidate X only about how his positions compare to those of Candidate Y, and not about the intellectual and moral justifications for those positions? A good example of this was the treatment that journos, even some politically conservative op-ed writers, gave to Senator Lieberman. They tended to treat him as an honorable conservative because he supports the war and has reasonable (as they see it) positions on a number of issues.

But Lieberman is also the guy who, as Al Gore's VP candidate in 2000, repudiated his earlier conservative positions (on school choice, racial preferences, etc.) and began parroting the Demo Left's party line. His doing so clearly had nothing to do with principle and everything to do with opportunism.

And now that the national mood, particularly on defense, has shifted in a more conservative direction, Lieberman (before he dropped out of the race) was again sounding like one of the most conservative Democrats. Yet journalists by and large ignored his troubling inconsistency -- that's the nicest term for it -- and concentrated instead on his standing in the horse race.

I don't mean to single out Lieberman; most of the other presidential candidates are worse (I rate Bush higher because of his competent war leadership -- an empirical fact, IMO -- as well as his relative consistency and more libertarian orientation). My question is why we should take seriously evaluations of presidential candidates that are typically framed exclusively in terms of other candidates. To be blunt about it, by any normal standard most of these guys are liars and phonies. But it's one thing to say that X is less bad than A, B and C (which is how most voters probably think about it), and quite another to pretend, as the press so often does, that candidates like Sharpton and Dean, much less Lieberman, can be taken seriously on their personal and intellectual merits.

(Robert Samuelson's discussion of press complicity in dishonest political arguments is worth reading in this regard.)

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 09:31 AM | Comments (4)

Quick reads

Good articles by Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter

Good counter point by Larry Kudlow

Posted by In-Cog-Nito at 12:05 AM | Comments (9)

February 25, 2004

Be Careful Selecting An Email Address

This post by Dan Gillmor contains a remark about spammers using non-existent return addresses that reminded me of something I learned from experience. Big-ISP email addresses that consist of short letter combinations are subject to use as phony return addresses on spam messages. (They are also subject to receiving spam generated by bots that spam all addresses from "aaa@xxx.com" to "zzz@xxx.com".) One of my email addresses is "xxx@bigISP.com", where "xxx" is a meaningless three-letter combination that I invented for reasons that don't matter here. I rarely send mail from this address, yet it receive lots of spam. And from time to time I receive waves of bounced messages in which my address appears in the "reply to" field -- IOW, a spammer forged my email address in his messages, and now, out of the thousands of unsolicited messages that he sent, the ones to bad addresses or full mailboxes get bounced to me. I'm sure that many of us have had similar experiences. Maybe the way to minimize this sort of thing is to use one's own domain for one's main email address. There may also be some value in making sure that the part of one's email address that's on the left of the "@" sign isn't too short.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 06:02 PM | Comments (6)

Police State

From Bruce Schneier :
Since 9/11, the Justice Department has asked for, and largely received, additional powers that allow it to perform an unprecedented amount of surveillance of American citizens and visitors. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in haste after 9/11, started the ball rolling. In December, a provision slipped into an appropriations bill allowing the FBI to obtain personal financial information from banks, insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos, and car dealerships without a warrant -- because they're all construed as financial institutions.

The litany continues. CAPPS-II, the government's vast computerized system for probing the backgrounds of all passengers boarding flights, will be fielded this year. Total Information Awareness, a program that would link diverse databases and allow the FBI to collate information on all Americans, was halted at the federal level after a huge public outcry, but is continuing at a state level with federal funding. Over New Year's, the FBI collected the names of 260,000 people staying at Las Vegas hotels. More and more, at every level of society, the "Big Brother is Watching You" style of total surveillance is slowly becoming a reality.

[...]

Instead, the DOJ (fueled by a strong police mentality inside the Administration) is directing our nation's political changes in response to 9/11. And it's making trade-offs from its own subjective perspective: trade-offs that benefit it even if they are to the detriment of others.

From the point of view of the DOJ, judicial oversight is unnecessary and unwarranted; doing away with it is a better trade off. They think collecting information on everyone is a good idea, because they are less concerned with the loss of privacy and liberty. Expensive surveillance and data mining systems are a good trade-off for them because more budget means even more power. And from their perspective, secrecy is better than openness; if the police are absolutely trustworthy, then there's nothing to be gained from a public process.

If you put the police in charge of security, the trade-offs they make result in measures that resemble a police state.


Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2004

The Unknown War

Jonathan sent me this post from Jim Miller's blog. Miller discusses a very good NYTimes article entitled "A Job for Rewrite: Stalin's War." Miller, and the NYTimes note the incredible fact that the military disaster known as Operation Mars is barely known in the West. The NYTimes gives particular credit to Col. David M. Glantz for bringing the murky history of the Soviet Side of World War II to light. I have read several of Col. Glantz's books. (e.g. this one and this one and this one.) He is the master in English of the Soviet war effort. Mars was a colossal disaster -- the Red Army lost more men in a few weeks than the USA lost in the entire war. The fact that the Mars defeat could be totally erased from history shows what type of regime Communist Russia really was: monolithic, Orwellian, a pyramid of corpses and lies.

Glantz's main lesson is that the Red Army was not a blunt instrument -- it got better and better as the war went on. It didn't just bleed all over the Germans, it learned its lessons from them, then turned around and treated the Wehrmacht to fiercer blitzkriegs than it had ever dished out itself. My adolescent belief that "Patton could have pushed them back to Moscow" has been amply demonstrated in the ensuing years to be utter fancy. Glantz's books prove the immense skill and quality attained by the Red Army by the end of the war. Again, I will ride my hobby horse and praise Franklin Roosevelt, our third greatest president. FDR was, as usual, right in how he handled the end of World War II: grab as much as you can, cut the best deal you can, bullshit the Russians, and lie low. Compared to the Red Army of 1945, what the Americans and British Commonwealth had on the ground was totally inadequate. FDR seemed to be better aware of that than some of his own generals. The idea of even the up-gunned Sherman and a handful of the new Pershings, with their 90mm guns, could have gone up against armadas of T-34-85s and Stalin IIs with their 122mm gun does not bear thinking about. And by the time the Allies and the Red Army had come into contact, the Soviets were just introducing the Stalin III, which to this day looks futuristic. Our people would have been eaten alive. The Red Army would have been on the English Channel. We got out of World War II very well indeed, with the best half of Europe in our hands, and virtually all of the fighting and dying having been done by the Russians. Anyway, that is all make believe stuff. The Japanese were still not beaten, they were fighting like tigers, no one knew if the atom bomb would work, and no rational person on the American side was seriously contemplating taking on the Russians.

Molotov thought FDR was a clever bastard who played his cards very well. He ought to know.

Posted by Lexington Green at 03:31 PM | Comments (15)

I'm Telling You, It's Going to be Close

Dick Morris cites to a recent Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll which shows Dubya in seriously deep doo-doo. Bush's job approval is at an all-time low of 45%. More importantly, as Morris points out, the public now ranks security concerns fourth in terms of priority, and Dubya is rated way lower than the Democrat on all non-national security issues. In other words, Jane Public trusts the Donks to spend the money on health care, education, etc. Voters are ambivalent about tax cuts. Morris suggests that Bush must talk up the dangers of terrorism, etc. But, that will backfire. Bush has to proclaim that his policies have succeeded, and by doing so, he makes himself less relevant and less desirable as a candidate.

A victorious war is instantly forgotten by the voting public. The American voter is a tough boss. She only wants to know, "what have you done for me lately." Past good service counts for nothing. The good news is that Jane Voter has concluded that Iraq was a good idea and that we won. She has also concluded that the Democrats, whatever they say, will carry on following much the same course that Bush has followed. So, for Republicans, the bad news is she now considers the war on terrorism, Iraq, etc. to be essentially resolved as political issues. And with the war effectively over, or at least under control, peacetime issues will dominate. This leaves only bread and butter issues, and the voting public appears to be in a mood where it wants new middle-class entitlements that only the Democrats will provide -- like subsidized day care so Mom can work all day. Ambivalence about tax cuts is no surprise. American middle class voters do not like anything which they perceive as benefiting the rich or the poor at their expense. George Stigler had an article about this years ago entitled " Director's Law of Public Income Redistribution", (Journal of Law & Economics, 1970, vol. 13, issue 1, pp. 1-10; not available online) named after U of C economist Aaron Director. Director and Stigler demonstrated that American government policy consistently benefited the middle class at the expense of the rich and the poor. This is contrary to most political rhetoric, but there it is. This is also consistent with Walter Russell Mead's finding that Jacksonian values have come to permeate the American suburban middle class -- and that Jacksonians are "opposed to federal taxes but obstinately fond of federal programs seen as primarily helping the middle class (Social Security and Medicare, mortgage interest subsidies)." And suburban voters trust the Democrats on these issues more than the Republicans. Also, Jacksonians do not much like foreigners, and the immigration and outsourcing issues are going to hurt Bush. I even think calling the invasion of Iraq "Operation Iraqi Liberation" was a mistake. Social work for foreigners does not get you much popularity with the American voting public.

Dubya seems to be tracking his father, despite his attempts not to. Bush, Sr. won a war and thought that would matter to people months later. It didn't. It was ancient history by election day '92. So while it is a long way to election day '04, I am not yet willing to bet that Dubya won't get a one way ticket back to Crawford on the same basis -- thanks for the war, there's the door. I'll only bet on this: Whatever happens, it is going to be close.

Posted by Lexington Green at 10:18 AM | Comments (47)

February 23, 2004

Quote of the Day


Here is one of the great paradoxes of modernity. The more the world changes, the more important history becomes. A few scholars like to say that the past is a foreign country, but they could not be more mistaken. The past is our country. Our own kin lived there. The memory of what they did is becoming ever more important as part of our lives.

-- David Hackett Fischer (From Washington's Crossing)

Posted by Lexington Green at 10:12 PM | Comments (1)

Our Future Arsenal

Browsing Chicago BoyzU.S. Air Force Plans for Future War in Space, we find:

The U.S. Air Force's proposed Long Range Strike Aircraft (LRSA) will use technologies enabling a rapid global delivery of force from bases located in the continental United States.
and of course

Hypervelocity Rod Bundles: Provides the capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space.
A related item, Small Rockets Hold Big Potential, says:

Hopes are growing for smaller rockets, which could lift satellites or bombs with a few minutes' notice, instead of in days or weeks.

The Air Force is studying how it might use such rockets, which could be ready and, on demand, deliver bombs halfway around the world ...

In other news, genomics is about to get incredibly cheap. Our army of hypervelocity rod bundle-wielding, B-3 bomber-flying ("a transatmospheric vehicle operating at up to Mach 14") Genghis Khan clones will CONQUER THE WORLD! BuwahahaHAHAHAHAHAHA!


Note to Jonathan: Please add "World Conquest" to the Primary Category list.

Posted by Jay Manifold at 07:40 PM | Comments (6)



Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 06:14 PM | Comments (4)

The Times Literary Supplement, the European "Mood"

Sometimes it is frustrating for an American to look at Europe, or "Europe," or the EU-as-Europe, and listen to European politicians. When the Yugoslavian civil war started in 1991 Jacques Poos, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg famously said "the hour of Europe has come." Why did he say this, when everybody knew that there was no "Europe" which could respond to the crisis, there were just a bunch of doddering socialist countries, which had militaries which could not do the work of imposing peace, populated by people who could not tolerate the thought of sending their own sons to impose order at bayonet-point. Yet, he said it. This is how European politicians typically talk. Much of the talk by Villepin and Chirac, Schroeder and Fischer, in the last two years has been of a similar airy-fairy character. They want to speak of abstractions, where the Americans want to know how many tons of cargo and how many armed men they can deliver to a fighting front by air.

I will switch topics for a moment, but fear not, I'll orbit back to what is wrong with the Europeans soon enough. I have friend whom I met through my brother in law. He is an older gentleman, retired, extremely well-read, with a large collection of books, and he shares my interest in economic and business history -- though he is far more learned than I in the latter area. It is his practice to hand off to my brother in law a few times a year a stack of the weekly TLSs which have piled up in his apartment. This stack eventually makes its way to me. The TLS, for those not familiar with it, is a weekly, tabloid-format publication, which has high quality reviews, often by true experts, on current academic books. There is always something good in any issues of the TLS.

The other night I was engaged in the pleasant task of reading through this stack. I noticed that John Keegan had a review of a book by one Wolfgang Schivelbusch entitled The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery. In the course of a faintly negative review, Keegan notes that "It is not surprising that a book on the moral and social consequences of defeat should be the work of a German." Keegan then notes that, counting Napoleon's conquest of Prussia in 1806, "Germany suffered shattering defeat three times in 150 years." He then gives a very brief sketch of the military and political responses to these defeats, noting that "in 1945 Germany renounced militarism for a consensual and legalistic internationalism" though perhaps "without abandoning its national aim of dominating Europe, if by non-military means." Keegan then observes of his own historical summary:

This is a highly pragmatic, English retrospective of modern German history. Wolfgang Schivelbush, being a German intellectual, is not pragmatic. Where the English would look for material reactions to defeat -- constitutional change, military reorganization, economic adaptation -- he seeks to discern the influence of ideas, movements, myth. To him collective mood is a more significant indicator of the state of a nation than collective activity, shared perception more meaningful than shared programme.

This German intellectual "anti-pragmatism" has a first cousin in the French approach to public affairs, which will famously reject observable facts as being not possible in theory. This presents a problem for Americans. We are, like Keegan's prototypical "Englishman," are interested in concrete, measurable things. The EU is somehow, to the European elite, much more than its observable features, its bureaucratic rules and procedures. It is an idea which is somehow better and more important than anything which it actually is or does.

Timothy Garton Ash put it very well, in an older (1996) but still valuable speech entitled "Is Europe Becoming Europe?":

I refer of course to "Europe" as an idea and an ideal, a dream, a vision, a grand design. To those idealistic and teleological visions of Europe as project, process, progress towards some finalité européen: visions and ideas which at once inform and legitimate, and are themselves informed and legitimated by, the political development of something now called the European Union. And of course, the very name "European Union" is itself a product of this approach. A Union is what it's meant to be, not what it is.

This idea of Europe is part of a "shared mood" which Keegan refers to. Recent American conduct is offensive to that mood. The substantively meaningless Kyoto Accord is similar. It was not capable of being enacted into law, let alone put into operation or enforced. It was part of a certain mood of feigned seriousness about "climate change." Bush's unapologetic rejection of the thing has driven many people to distraction. He broke the mood. They want to play make believe, while Bush and his team think there are more urgent matters at stake. That is unfortunate, but it is not going to change any time soon, if Bush is reelected.

(I see also in the TLS that a new translation has appeared of Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel (trans. Michael Hoffman). This astonishing book must be read if one is to make any sense of what happened in the 20th Century. Perhaps I'll elaborate on this at some point.)

Posted by Lexington Green at 01:02 PM | Comments (15)

February 22, 2004

Nader Won't Make A Decisive Difference

Ralph Nader announced his latest run for the presidency, amid press hoopla. I doubt that he'll have a decisive effect this time. The reason? Everybody knows, in retrospect, that Nader's participation in 2000 killed Gore's chances. Given the intensity of anti-Bush feeling among the Democratic Left, Democratic voters are unlikely to chance a repeat of the 2000 experience (just as many Republicans and independents who had voted for Perot in 1992 were unreceptive to conservative and libertarian third-party candidates in 2000).

Not everyone learns from his mistakes, but most people do if the consequences are important enough. There's no reason to expect Democratic voters to ignore history and plunge off the same cliff twice.

UPDATE: Jim Miller makes a different and more sophisticated argument that reaches the same conclusion about Nader as I did. However, Miller goes further and argues that Nader may not even have been decisive in 2000.

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 03:49 PM | Comments (12)

What's With Drudge?

This morning he's got a headline about the death of the president's dog but nothing about a Jerusalem terror bombing that killed and wounded many people. Is Drudge taking the day off or are terror attacks in Israel so common as no longer to be news?

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 11:39 AM | Comments (5)

February 21, 2004

Quote of the Day

"The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

-- William Faulkner

Posted by Lexington Green at 03:16 PM | Comments (2)

E-Mail Tirade About Bush, etc.

I got an email a few days ago from my friend Dave. He’s a Lefty who lives in England, but he supported the war, as he supported the Bosnian intervention, since he thinks it is the liberal thing to do to depose horrible dictators. An old-fashioned view on the Left these days, but one which provides some common ground for us. He is nonetheless, pretty anti-Bush. He sent me this anti-Bush screed, which makes fairly tired arguments and incorrect statements, including this one: "This doctrine originally declared that the United States has the right to attack a hostile power that possesses weapons of mass destruction."

My response was about as follows:

No. Wrong. "We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends." See National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

Note: "before". How much before? As much as we deem necessary for our security. Other than this inexcusable and easily checked error, I thought the article was trivial. Bottom line, Saddam had way less shit than we thought. This is big news. This is actually a good thing, and we could only find it out by conquering him. He was so stupid he lied about it and fucked around until we conquered him. If he'd have fessed up he'd be at his desk now, and his sons would be raping somebody. He apparently either didn't know better himself or figured his power rested on people thinking he had the stuff. Maybe he'll write his memoirs and we'll find out. Does it mean Bush lied? I don't think so. Does this mean going into Iraq was wrong? I don't think so. Does this all mean Kerry gets elected? Maybe. This issue will help him with some moderate voters. We'll see what Jane Voter thinks in November. If Iraq is more or less quiet and the economy has not tanked, Bush will almost certainly win, on historical trends. But, anything can happen. A Kerry/Clinton ticket is likely. This would lead to lots of excitement and a large turnout of women voters who might put the Donk ticket over the top. This is an interesting year. Carl Rove has said from day one the next election will be very close, as close as the last one, and I think he is right. I did not watch the Bush interview. I read the transcript. It was weak. If he keeps on like that, he can lose. We'll see how he does. His biggest danger may be alienated righties who are mad about the spending binge and his attempted immigration reform. There is real anger out there. But, Nixon irritated the same type of people in 1972 with his pre-election spending tsunami, and he won in a landslide. And running against your core, assuming there is no third party challenge, to reach into the center, is usually effective.

Continue reading "E-Mail Tirade About Bush, etc."

Posted by Lexington Green at 03:07 PM | Comments (4)

February 20, 2004

What's our next job?

As programming jobs get progressively simplified, and more people learn how to do them, will all of our skilled high-tech labor end up working at Wal-Mart?

Well, no. First of all, our skilled high-tech labor won't really be through with programming until Wal-Mart's run themselves - checkout would be done by detecting RF tags as they leave the store, and charging it to a credit card you swipe on your shopping cart, which has a bag dispenser so you put your items into the bags as you take them down from the shelves, while the shelves get stocked by automated wheeled gizmos that read that same tag and know where everything goes. The Indian programmers will be helping with that, too, of course; us programmers aren't the only ones their programmers will be competing against.

And don't think plumbers and other tradesmen are safe either, nor anyone that thinks they add value by being on-site. Given enough bandwidth and the right software, you can remote-control a humanoid robot to do everything from the other side of the planet from fixing someone's toilet to waving your hands and drawing on a whiteboard at a meeting.

Second, there's plenty more work to be done by people that can use their brains and solve problems. Don't believe me? Take a look at the sky. Air traffic is depressingly thin; most of our traffic crawls along the ground on little narrow strips and keeps getting caught in innumerable bottlenecks. The Solar System is completely deserted, as is everything beyond. The aging process is still just as lethal as it's ever been. Portable computers are still kind of clunky, since you have to either have a big, bulky keyboard or input letters one at a time through an awkward phonepad-style interface; gizmos to read brainwaves are still in the prototype stages. While we're on the subject of brainwaves, a reliable lie detector would be most helpful.

Oh, and those monster particle accelerators? How about little tiny ones instead? I'm sure we could find all sorts of profitable uses for those.

And that's just the beginning. Down the road, we'll be looking into things like breaking Einstein's speed limit and seeing if there's something interesting we can do with dark matter. We'll work on gravity generators; couple those with brainwave interfaces, and everyone will be able to move things and build things just by thinking about it.

The point is, there's thousands of years worth of work for all of us to do at the very least. Maybe millions of years. Maybe there isn't a limit at all. If there is, we can't even see it from here. It's extremely short-sighted to say that we're all going to be working at Wal-Mart because foreigners have learned how to program - if programming is the ultimate in human achievement, then the human race isn't what I thought it was.

Whether foreigners learn to program or not, there's so much other work to do that the most important questions we should be asking ourselves is:

1. What barriers can we remove to make it easier to turn a profit chipping away at that multi-millenia backlog of advancement that stands between our pathetic Earthbound civilization and our future as a truly advanced species? The computer industry offers a clue; it's the closest to pure laissez-faire that we've seen in quite some time, and it's had unparalleled success in pushing performance and quality up and prices down in its offerings.

2. How do we best streamline the process of retraining for the new tasks as the old ones become commoditized? Universities are not especially efficient at this task; we need something better, for everyone from the high-end talent on down.

3. How do we ensure that we continue enticing the world's best talent to our shores? Lots of economic and personal liberty would be my suggestion.

Posted by ken at 11:07 PM | Comments (6)

What An Honor

Classical Values blog reports that Chicagoboyz is one of many blogs that are blocked by the content-filtering system that is marketed to libraries and big companies and the like by a company called SonicWALL.

I guess some of us (cough) use bad words, or perhaps we link to evil pro-gun sites ("violent content"), or maybe it's just that we are opinionated and argue a lot. Or maybe someone misinterpreted the name of the blog. Whatever. God forbid an innocent child or sensitive person should read our posts and be corrupted, made to feel uncomfortable or subjected to a hostile environment.

These filtering systems are inherently flawed because somebody has to decide which topics to censor and which algorithms to use to detect them. Even if the people who run the filters mean well, their incentive will always be to forbid more rather than less. Sometimes that's because 1) it's easier (no need to spend time assessing evidence and drawing distinctions), and 2) censorware customers are probably less likely to complain -- or sue -- if the blocking algorithm is too restrictive than if it is too liberal. And sometimes it's because the people who design the filters are politically correct control-freaks.

This kind of software is an expensive cure relative to the costs of the problems it is supposed to address.

(via InstaPundit and The Gweilo Diaries)

Posted by Jonathan Gewirtz at 03:15 PM | Comments (8)

February 19, 2004

Mardi Gras Nuttiness

OK, now for something light, even silly. My friend Dave is a lawyer who lives in New Orleans, right in the French Quarter. I have known him since 1981. He was the pledge master at my Phi Delt chapter. He is a total maniac. After he moved to New Orleans, there was a brouhaha involving the Krew of Comus, one of the very old social clubs which put a float in the Mardi Gras parade every year. The city barred any organization from participating which did not racially integrate. So, after over a century, Comus was off the street. Dave, a traditionalist of an extreme sort, was upset. So, he spent a fortune having a spectacular Comus costume made for himself, and he returned Comus to the party all by himself. He founded the Mistick Social Drinking Club of Comus as the vehicle for an annual party, which commences at 9:00 a.m. on Fat Tuesday at his pad, which then spills out into the street. I have yet to be able to go. But I at least write an elaborate regrets letter, this year's went thus:

Thrice hail, O Great Comus!

I am in receipt of your missive anent those delightful annual revelries, which will raise many raucous shouts and much jolly laughter, amidst copious bibulation, in daylong merriment, both within your own temple precincts and bursting forth as it were onto the ancient flagstones of the French Quarter of the Crescent City. Yet again you so kindly deign to solicit my participation in these fabled events. Yet again, O thrice great Comus, I tremblingly approach you, and humbly prostrate before your Olympian eminence, I express my renewed and tearful regret that I must once more decline your proffered invitation. Train not upon me thy baleful eye! Visit not upon me thy more-than-human wrath! Would that I could join you, and those others similarly blessed by your many kindnesses, garbed in motley (or other suitably festive raiment) in full-throated imbibement and convivial companionship -- before embarking on the usual course of severe and arduous Lenten austerities commencing the next day. I pray that you will forgive my absence, knowing as you do that duty alone keeps me from your company. I trust that you will convey my greetings to the assembled throng of your votaries. I hope too that you will quaff at least one flagon of savory and ardent spirits in my name, O most splendiferous and aureate Comus! Farewell.


Maybe some year I’ll make it down there.

Posted by Lexington Green at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

New Baghdad Journal

Kaedrin has a good post with links to all seven of Steve Mumford's Baghdad Journal columns. Good coverage of Iraq, good art. Worth a visit.

Posted by Lexington Green at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

Primary Visual

Is there really no such thing as bad publicity ?
“I wouldn't kick President Bush out of my bed, although I do think he needs some sassy highlights.”

Carson Kressley, fashion expert on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”.
(From The Economist)

Posted by Sylvain Galineau at 09:47 AM | Comments (6)